It is well-known in the art to monitor the operating condition of a computer system through the use of a troubleshooting program known as a trace program. Typically, a standard set of trace entries will resolve the majority of problems encountered in the operation of the computer system. However, the creation of a trace entry requires a certain amount of memory in the central processing unit (CPU) of the system. Hence, in order to minimize the amount of CPU memory utilized by the standard trace program, the size of trace programs is usually kept small. This limits the type of information that can be collected by the standard trace program. Additionally, a larger trace program would slow down the performance of the operating system of the computer system.